Textron Is On A Mission To Innovate

Once the world economy started slowing in 2007, Textron changed how it approached innovation in order to bring new aircraft and helicopters to market quicker, and with more cutting-edge technologies, than ever before.

“We went from asking, ‘Can we do it?’ to ‘What will it take?” said Michael Thacker, Textron’s Engineering SVP. “This change was across the board, from our supply chain to our customers, and it influenced both the direction and pace of our innovation.”

The approach, internally called speed with nocompromises, meant building collaborative, real-time partnerships between departments, like putting people who’d eventually have to build a product at the table during its design steps. Expanded data sets on service and maintenance were applied to manufacturing plans. Budgets were committed when an industry-wide sales slump might have suggested otherwise.

“When you reframe the question, you get a different answer,” Thacker explained. “We found that opening the door to possibilities not only sped development, but improved outcomes.” As a result, Textron Aviation was able to get 3 new Citation business jets to market with just a few years of development, instead of the industry average of a decade or more.

The new Cessna Citation Longitude™ business jet (Image credit: Textron)

There’s a similar innovation success story behind Bell’s 525 Relentless helicopter, which has completed two flight tests, and is now in its prototype phase.

“In 2012, we set out to build the world’s most innovative helicopter,” said Matt Hasik, Bell’s EVP of Commercial Business. “We did it by challenging the notion of trade-offs.”

Compromise is a central tenet of most technology projects, as each performance attribute must be balanced against the benefits and costs of others. In aviation, for instance, it can mean that greater speed, or the ability to carry more payload, might require fewer safety redundancies in order to reduce overall weight.

Bell’s engineers rejected this notion, and looked to the hundreds of thousands of hours of flight data it had on its military tiltrotor aircraft, the V-22 Osprey, which used fly-by-wire technology and specialized rotor, transmission and engine designs to overcome any meaningful requirements for compromise. One of the key insights was that better pilot warning, even measured in seconds, could have massive implications for crisis resolution and safety overall.

Although this development process involved designing, sourcing, and building an entirely new helicopter, Bell reduced each step from years to months, and the costs just as substantially.

“We did it by staying focused on the mission: No compromises,” Hasik said.

“Performance is everything,” Thacker added. “An aircraft has to do what we say it’ll do.”